"It is as if we all live in our own private inside-out black hole."
Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War
A book in a discouraged season
In the years just before I met Timothy, my working life and the School were pulling against each other. My primary business was doing better than I had ever hoped, with record results in our proprietary software development, and I am still very grateful for that success. The same success left me very little time for the School. Most of its teaching lived in scattered PowerPoints, handwritten journals and private notes, and over the prior decade I had tried many times to build a website that would hold it all together. None of those attempts had come to anything I could give a student, and I had begun to feel discouraged.
In that season I found the YouTube videos of a Jungian scholar named Timothy Desmond, and I watched most of them, one after another. In October 2021 I read his book, Psyche and Singularity: Jungian Psychology and Holographic String Theory, published in 2018. It was the first work I had read in over a decade that did not feel like just another derivative angle on the same old material. It was a brilliant, fresh philosophy, and it spoke to everything I had labored to build.
Timothy (Tod) Desmond is a Jungian scholar and Platonist with a doctorate in philosophy and religion from the California Institute of Integral Studies. His dissertation of 2014, "Psyche=singularity: A comparison of Carl Jung's transpersonal psychology and Leonard Susskind's holographic string theory", grew into the book. He has also lectured on the hidden parallels between Plato's Republic and Euripides' Bacchae.
His book sets the Jungian account of the Self beside the holographic picture of the Cosmos drawn by the physicist Leonard Susskind and his colleagues. Timothy starts from Jung's Self, the archetype of wholeness and the union of all pairs of opposites, and asks what in the physics of the Cosmos has the same shape. His answer is the Singularity at the center and the Horizon at the edge. From there he arrives at the identification that the undivided origin of the Cosmos, known from within, is the psychic ground itself. Two of his sentences I have carried into our School's teaching ever since:
"Thus the ultimate archetype of the Self, defined as the union of all pairs of opposites, can be further defined by breaking down each side of the ultimate equation of opposites, Psyche=Singularity, into its own constituent pair of opposites: Self = Conscious–Unconscious = Singularity–Horizon. The overall implication of the parallels between Jung's and Susskind's theories is that the conscious aspect of the archetype of the Self is the central Singularity of the universe, while the unconscious aspect of the archetype of the Self is the surrounding Horizon."
Timothy Desmond, Psyche and Singularity
The Jung/Pauli Conjecture I knew well, and I had long held that mind and matter rise from a single root. I had never seen anyone carry that root into string theory and cosmology the way Timothy did, with Jung on one side of the page and Susskind on the other. Reading him, I watched an intuition I had kept in my journals for years, that the sciences of our age are a revelation that supports the arts of theurgic ascent, being worked out by another mind in another language.
Timothy gave me the black hole as a figure of center and circumference, a point of infinite density at its heart and a horizon wrapped around it. In the temple I stand at the center of a circle and call the gods to its quarters and its height, and Timothy showed me, with the physics in hand, that the center and the circumference of that circle are one Self.
Timothy drew his conclusions mainly from two of Susskind's popular works, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics and The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. I read both of them as well. He also supplied our School with the formal statement of the two poles in two sentences, the first setting the archetype of matter beside the archetype of the psyche and the second giving the formula of center and circumference, and both stand in our Central Doctrine under his name.
Facebook, February 2022, and the hours on the phone
In February 2022 I reached out to Timothy over Facebook. He answered, and to my amazement we quickly became friends. From then on we would spend hours on the phone, and the conversations went wherever they wanted to go. We moved from Jung and Pauli to the black hole, from Susskind to the Vaiṣṇava teaching, from Plato and the Platonists to the yogas of India, and back again.
Timothy is a devotee of Krishna consciousness and a student of the teachings of his guru, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. My own deepest devotion is to Ma Kālī, the Mother who changed the course of my life in India. In our talks we found that we were looking at one reality from two sides of one Divine Parent, he from the side of Kṛṣṇa and I from the side of the Mother. Through Timothy I came to the deeper liturgical depth of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava school, and I bought the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, which I have studied and am still studying.
Out of those talks came the reading of the Cosmos as the body of a Person that our School now teaches. The omnicentric Singularity, present undivided at every point, is Kṛṣṇa. The encompassing manifestation, the greater spacetime that holds every world, is Kālī. I developed this reading with Timothy, and our Central Doctrine founds it. It joined the two great devotions of my life in one figure, the Mother as the womb of all the worlds and Kṛṣṇa as the one present whole at the center of each of them.
I picture Kṛṣṇa as the lucid dreamer of the world, an image I came to myself and one the Gauḍīya teachers do not give. You know, or can come to know, the moment in a dream when you realize that you are dreaming, and the dream goes on while you are now awake within it. Kṛṣṇa, awake within the dream of Viṣṇu, is the cosmic form of what the theurgist becomes at small scale, the observing "I" awake within the projected world while still living in it. Steadied, the lucid dreamer finds the ground beneath the dream, the solar center about which the whole microcosm turns, and can play in the dream of the world, love in it and know the gods in it, free of its bondage. Behind it stands the Gauḍīya cosmology of the dreaming Lord, which Timothy later set out for me in a letter.
Another image I owe to that friendship is the universe as an inside-out black hole, the figure Susskind himself reaches for in The Black Hole War. A black hole seen from outside is a region whose interior is hidden behind a horizon. A universe such as ours, seen from inside, is a region bounded by a horizon beyond which nothing can be seen. The black hole encloses its singularity, and our universe proceeds from its singularity and is enclosed from within by its horizon.
Bending the mind into shapes
One teaching of Timothy's went straight into my practice, and it has stayed there. He described Jñāna yoga, the yoga of knowledge, by setting it beside the physical yoga everyone has seen. In his words, "It is like the hatha yoga you see in the gyms all over the country where they are bending themselves into shapes. Jiana yoga is the bending of one's mind into shapes that when held for a significant amount of time releases knowledge."
When I heard that, I recognized my own work in it. Hatha yoga holds postures of the body, Jñāna yoga holds postures of the mind, and holding a posture of the mind is what we do in theurgic ritual. I had written about the holding of a state in my journals under one name and another, and Timothy gave me a plain way to say it that a beginner could understand on the first day, and we now teach the mechanics of invocation through his analogy.
A student of Hatha yoga learns a posture by taking the shape and holding it. At first the muscles shake, the breath shortens and the mind looks for a way out, and over weeks the shaking diminishes as the body learns the shape. In the rite each Name of the Grand Invocation is a posture, and so is each visualization, each gesture of a planetary god and each stroke of a pentagram. A posture struck and immediately abandoned releases nothing, as Timothy taught, and so each Name is followed by the Sign of Silence and each planetary invocation by at least three full breaths of silence. We ask something harder of the theurgist than Hatha yoga asks of the body, as the forms are built one upon another and held together until the many postures become one posture.
In our School his image now opens the guide to scrying in The Divine Arcana Tarot. It stands behind our teaching that a god is met by taking its shape and keeping that shape long enough for knowledge to come. A student bends the mind into the shape of Hermes or Apollo and holds it, as the body holds a posture on the mat, and the god is known from inside that shape.
July 2022: Timothy comes to Idaho
In July 2022 Timothy flew to Idaho to see me. I was surprised and very glad that he would come so far to meet in person a man he had come to know over the phone. We spent considerable time together during that visit, and we took a trip up to Yellowstone Park, which is about one hundred miles north of my home.
Among the geysers and the hot springs we could finally talk face to face, after months of talking through a telephone. Timothy has been a dear friend of our School ever since.
Three months with one paper
The more Timothy and I talked, the more I wanted to know what Susskind was alluding to in the actual papers that led to the writing of his popular books. So I chose one paper and gave it the whole summer of 2022. It was "The Multiverse Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" by Raphael Bousso and Leonard Susskind, first posted on 19 May 2011, revised on 22 July 2011 and published in Physical Review D in 2012.
I believed that my background as an engineer in systems development, and my long study of quantum mechanics, would at least partly equip me to understand the paper. I was completely unprepared for what lay ahead.
The entire summer, three months of intense study, went to reading, rereading and looking up unfamiliar terms. Among them were de Sitter space and anti-de Sitter space, the space of negative cosmological constant that I first met as "negative de Sitter", and the hat regions of the multiverse. The paper introduced me to causal diamonds, the largest regions of spacetime that a single observer could ever probe, and they were far more complex than I had anticipated.
I spent hours creating my own documents, in which I took portions of the paper and recombined them with the terms I had to find outside it. When I came to a section I could not understand, the definitions it needed were now placed first, before the section. I remapped these documents several times.
Then I took long drives with my truncated documents playing on Speechify, and I listened to them over and over. I must have listened to these combined documents at least once, and sometimes twice, a day over the course of the entire summer.
Gradually I began to refine a very clear definition of a particular conclusion Susskind was drawing. That central concept led me into progressively deeper visionary states as I pondered his ideas over the weeks of my investigation.
When I first read that paper, with very deep excitement, the ancient intuition re-emerged before me with mathematical rigor. Bousso and Susskind wrote to secure the consistency of quantum mechanics in an eternally inflating cosmos. What they found is a structure that matches the ancient vision point for point, a finite, approximate, temporal description of a history lived from within, and an exact, complete description of the same history held at a boundary.
The many worlds in a single geometry
Until that summer my model of the work rested on quantum mechanics in the Orthodox reading of John von Neumann and Henry Stapp, with the observer's choice of question, the Zeno effect, the Jung/Pauli Conjecture, the body of light and the other variables of our ritual praxis. The many-worlds picture and the multiverse had no place in it. Through Timothy's work I was introduced to both for the first time, and the paper gave me the aha moment.
Bousso and Susskind put forward the idea that "the many-worlds of quantum mechanics and the many worlds of the multiverse are the same thing". In the abstract of their paper they state that "the global multiverse is a representation of the many-worlds (all possible decoherent causal diamond histories) in a single geometry." That vision of all the many worlds gathered into one geometry, and of the whole of that geometry existing at every point in spacetime, impacted me very deeply, and it has stayed with me ever since.
What I came to see in their technical explanation goes one step further. For quantum experiments to stay irreversible, the coherent totality of the multiverse's single geometry, a perfect unity, must be present in its entirety at every point. This matters most for the experiments that depend on entanglement to reach the "highest degree of freedom" in their outcomes. We ourselves are part of these quantum experiments through our direct, moment-to-moment experience, and we are drawn toward one branch-history world line over another and decohere into it as we live.
The presence of this fully coherent whole directs our entanglement with the world line we finally merge with. We metabolizing human beings are one with this geometric unity. In our School we gave that whole its own name, the Eternal Inflating Spacetime Geometric Unity.
String theory added a second piece. In it our experience in three dimensions is only one aspect of a universe of several dimensions, and the higher dimensions are rolled up into tiny closed shapes present at every point of ordinary space. Wherever you are, the whole of them is there, at the center of that point. From this physical fact I was given an image, and in our School it has become our structural image.
Visualize a circle that symbolizes your own existence, and enclosed within this circle a higher dimension, a region that both contains and goes beyond our familiar three-dimensional space. This dimension contains our known universe and also regions beyond it, extending into even higher dimensions. The full expanse of our Cosmos, together with these additional dimensions, is held within the circle that represents you. This higher dimension is linked with your very being, surrounding you and integrating you, and from this integration it radiates outward to the whole of the Cosmos, tying you to every layer of spatial dimension and placing you at the center of the universe.
What I received that summer was a way of seeing, a vision the paper opened in me of the whole present at every point of Our Divine Infinite Being, and the traditions I had studied recognized it at once. The Mandala of Jung, the circle whose center is also its whole circumference, was there. The Platonic One, undivided in every part, was there. The Paramātmā of the Vaiṣṇavas, the minute form of Viṣṇu in the center of every atom, was there, and so were the gods of Iamblichus, present whole to everything that can receive them. Each of these I had studied as a separate teaching, and now I saw them as one picture with a physics underneath it.
The ochēma and the cosmic horizon
The deepest change that summer was in my understanding of the ochēma, the star-vehicle of the Neoplatonists and the soul's spherical body. I had worked with the body of light for many years, and I knew it as the vessel in which the gods are met and whose shape the theurgist comes to wear. Until 2022 I knew it from the inside, as the sphere around the practitioner in the temple. That summer its relation to physics from the cosmic perspective seriously sank in.
Every observer is the center of their own horizon. The cosmic horizon is a sphere centered on each one of us, the boundary beyond which nothing can be seen, and in the holographic picture that boundary keeps the complete description of everything within it. If the horizon is a sphere about each observer, then every boundary nested inside it is a sphere about the same center, and what the horizon holds arrives whole at each of them.
I saw that the ochēma of the theurgist stands in that same order. It is the spherical boundary of the self, the reflected centrality of the cosmic horizon, the whole horizon carried at the scale of a person. A hologram shows something like it in the laboratory, where a broken plate still shows the whole image in each fragment, at lower resolution. With that recognition the old vehicle of Proclus and Iamblichus took its place in the modern Cosmos for me, and our School now calls this the doctrine of reflected centrality.
The holographic principle opened one more door. At the far end of your own light, present to the whole cosmos at every point of its perimeter, there is another you, the eternal self our School calls the Divine Double. I first glimpsed that other self in the weeks when the holographic principle opened before me. The Egyptians knew it in the Ba and the Ka, and the Platonists knew it in their own language, and I had read about it for years. That summer I began to know it as the far pole of a relation whose near pole is my own awareness.
I remember very well a televised PBS discussion of the question "Is the universe a hologram?" Susskind was asked the question every student of holography eventually asks, whether we are the projection or the outer surface is the projection, and which one is reality. He replied in substance that it is your choice, you decide what you are, but the mathematics says they are equivalent. When another participant protested that they felt they were here, he answered that their image on the boundary was also saying that it felt it was here. He added that the mathematics does not care which way you think about it, that it says there is an equivalence, and that this is about all we can say.
For a theurgist the exchange means that the center where I stand in the temple and the boundary where my Double is held are one description seen from two places.
The perfect paradox
The many-worlds picture brought a problem into my model that I could not ignore. If every thread of a life already exists in the single geometry, then freedom has to be found somewhere inside it. The Orthodox reading I had worked with for so long gives the observer a real choice of the question put to nature, and the rite is built on that choice. The multiverse seemed to take it away, and I carried that problem with me through the summer and brought it to Timothy.
His answer came from the school of Caitanya, from the doctrine of achintya-bhedābheda, the inconceivable simultaneous oneness and difference. Timothy sums it up in one thought, that "we are absolutely free and all at once absolutely determined." When I heard him put it that way, the two pictures fell into place for me. In our Central Doctrine the tenet has two witnesses, the road by which I came to it myself, through a friendship, a summer spent with one paper and the visionary states that paper opened in me, and the Gospel of Thomas read through achintya-bhedābheda, where the same paradox appears in the first centuries of our era.
Following the principle of complementarity that Niels Bohr introduced into physics and that Pauli carried into his dialogue with Jung, I stopped trying to choose between the two pictures. The Orthodox picture describes reality from the smallest dimension, the point of observation, the center. The Multiverse picture describes it from the largest dimension, the whole cosmos, the circumference. Seen from the circumference, every thread of a life already exists and we are wholly destined. Seen from the center, from the one who attends, invokes and holds, our engagement decides which thread becomes the lived path, and there we are wholly free.
We hold both interpretations whole, without averaging them and without calling the question undecidable. In our School we call this the perfect paradox, a formulation we owe to Timothy. The Self stands at the center of the figure and God at its circumference, and the two interpretations become the two places from which one figure is seen. In time it became our ruling on fate and freedom, that the sky fixes the necessary class of experience and the soul chooses the thread and the octave in which it is lived. That ruling is achintya-bhedābheda applied to the chart.
Letters
Some of what Timothy gave me came in writing. I have kept his letters, and in our books we cite them as personal communication, with my own reflections kept apart from his words. One of them put our shared vision in a single sentence:
"The Self and God archetype are just synonyms for the same thing, the ultimate archetype of wholeness through the union of opposites, which is therefore both the smallest dimension imaginable (the central point of infinite density) and the largest dimension (the Cosmic Horizon, the encompassing sphere of the universe)."
Timothy Desmond, letter to Eddie Paredes
Another letter I asked him for. The many worlds called to mind a passage of the Vaiṣṇava teaching, and I asked Timothy to give a more thorough explanation of the Gauḍīya account. He wrote of Mahā-Viṣṇu lying upon the Causal Ocean in mystic sleep, yoga-nidrā, exhaling innumerable bubble universes from the pores of his skin and inhaling them again. He wrote of the Lord entering each of those universes, down to the Supersoul who occupies the center of every atom in each one of them. He closed with Prabhupada's purport on the Bhāgavatam, that the material world is the Lord's dreaming condition and that "the Lord's dreaming conditions are also factual manifestations."
I had read that cosmology before and loved it as poetry. After Bousso and Susskind I read it as a description. A great Person breathing out universes and entering each one whole, present undivided at the center of every point of every one of them, is the single geometry present at every point, as the Gauḍīya sages of Bengal taught it. Our School gives Timothy's letter in full in the Central Doctrine.
Psyche = Singularity
Over those months the friendship and the study came together into one recognition, and it already had its short name, Psyche = Singularity. The name is Timothy's own, the title of his dissertation of 2014. The undivided origin of the Cosmos, present beneath every point and known from within, is the psychic ground itself. The revelation concerning the Jung/Pauli Conjecture and holographic string theory was given to Timothy, and it became my own through our long friendship. I have made his identification part of our School's foundation, and our books credit it to him. Put in the simplest terms, the Cosmos described by holographic physics has the shape of the Mandala, and its center, the Singularity, is the psyche known from within. With quantum mechanics and, in our own day, string theory, we have been given sacred keys to understanding our existence through a modern Platonic world view, and Timothy above all has drawn those connections for me.
In our Central Doctrine it stands in the First Pillar. The name Our Divine Infinite Being is a triad. Infinite is the center, the Singularity, whole and undivided wherever we stand and met from the inside as our own psyche. Divine is the circumference, the cosmic horizon, the enclosing womb that holds all that exists and all that could. Being names the living geometry of spacetime that stands between them. Center and circumference are one Self, the Self/God archetype, and its emblem is the Mandala.
I had used the name of our School for many years. After 2022 I could show a student what each of its three words points to in the Cosmos.
I owe very much to my friend and teacher Timothy Desmond. I came to him with a long practice behind me, and he showed me where it opened onto the largest picture modern physics has drawn, and he walked part of that road with me. So much of our Doctrine grew from our long conversations. In the Appreciations of our Central Doctrine he stands first among the six who made the biggest impact on my way of thinking and on the tenets and training of our School, Timothy Desmond, Carl Jung, Wolfgang Pauli, Henry Stapp, Gregory Shaw and the Neoplatonic father of theurgy, Iamblichus.
Helping to build his course
In the time after that summer I became highly involved in helping Timothy develop and launch his online course, Immortality and the Unreality of Death: A Hero's Journey through Philosophy, Psychology, and Physics. It runs over fifteen hours across 330 segments, which make up a total of 25 training sessions. The course speaks of our eternal natures and the Hero's journey and dives into the data on near-death experiences, which offer glimpses into the ecstatic release of reuniting with family and friends beyond this life.
I encourage our students to take some time with his work, which can be found at www.PsycheandSingularity.com.
What the summer did to the work
The rite itself changed. In my practice the answer to a working often arrived some hours after the work had stopped, with the felt quality of recognition, and the Bousso and Susskind paper gave me a measure for that interval. In one of their thought experiments the line between a system and its environment is drawn at the edge of the solar system, and they write that "the collapse of the system wavefunction cannot take place until a photon from the detector has passed Pluto's orbit. This would take about five hours during which the system wavefunction is coherent."
From that thought experiment grew one of our practices. In our School the theurgist is the detector and the rite is the event. Every major operation is followed by a completion meditation about five and a half hours later, the light-time from the Earth to Pluto's mean distance, when the light of the rite has crossed the rim of the planetary sphere.
The way I hold a state changed as well. Before 2022 I held the god at the center of the temple as something called into it. After 2022 I understood that the whole is already present at that center, entire, and that holding the state is a matter of staying in the shape of what is already there until it becomes my experience. The discipline of attention stayed the same, and now I had a picture of the Cosmos behind it that agreed with what I had felt in the rite.
The way I teach freedom and fate changed most of all. The perfect paradox gave our students a way to live with destiny and with choice at once, and a student can feel the sky as necessity and the will as free in the same hour of practice.
And our School found the language for its own cosmology. The Mandala as Psyche = Singularity, the Kālī and Kṛṣṇa reading of the Cosmos, the ochēma as reflected centrality, the Divine Double at the far end of our light, the inside-out black hole, the structural image and the perfect paradox each came out of those conversations and that summer. Each of them went into the Central Doctrine, which I had sat down to formalize that February, and from there into the books that followed it.